Trespass More: My Resolution for 2015
I’ve always had a horror of breaking small rules. My earliest memory is of being three years old at an amusement park, riding a smiling duck that went round and round a concrete pool. It was so much fun, I got a rush of toddler adrenalin and sprang to my feet — and promptly got shouted at by a park employee, which mortified me and made me cry. The shame of this transgression stuck. I grew into a kid who colored inside the lines, an adult who rereads and overthinks forms at the doctor’s office before filling them out.
This anxiety has seeped into my work as a journalist. I write about architecture and cities. Since you can’t really understand a building or place without experiencing it in person, whenever possible, I visit what I’m reporting on. If that’s a park or museum, or a six-block commercial strip, it’s easy enough. A whole city starts to open up when you spend 48 or 72 hours in it. But many places still remain out of bounds: private residences. Government facilities. Office buildings, if the guard in the lobby looks twitchy. Barred or discouraged from entry (even proximity), my instinct is to quietly accept this and walk away.
Public space is under threat, as the past year showed us all too clearly. Private interests and security-minded governments cordon off more and more of it via explicit rules and barriers, or just with the implication that we’re not welcome — unstated, but signaled in ways that are intimidating and hard to miss (cones, bollards, twitchy security guards). These bother me more than Keep Out signs. They are more arbitrary and just as tough to challenge, at least for me.
Earlier this year, I tamped down my scaredy-cat reflex and trespassed on private property. I was in New York City and wanted to see a neighborhood in Queens that belonged to the early-20th-century Garden City movement, which I was researching. As is common in Garden City developments, the houses in this one share green spaces—here, planted courtyards, which rows of townhouses back onto and nearly enclose. There was nothing for it but to ignore the signs, sneak down a footpath into a courtyard, and snap a few photos before anyone challenged me.
Residents of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens: I’m sorry.
Except maybe I’m not? Worse than overcoming my nerves that day was feeling stupid for hours after, knowing I had been ridiculous to fret over such a tiny infraction. So what if someone had asked me what I was doing: I had a perfectly reasonable explanation. In fact, I wondered, why on Earth don’t I trespass more? There’s no shortage of inaccessible places worth seeing, and seeing them causes no harm.
So what if someone had asked me what I was doing: I had a perfectly reasonable explanation. In fact, I wondered, why on Earth don’t I trespass more?
Years ago, when my husband and I were dating, we snuck onto the grounds of a crumbling Sir John Soane mansion in the English countryside and got enjoyably spooked peering over the edge of an empty pool. We haven’t done anything like that since — a combination of age, and parenthood, and living in a country where trespassers (real and presumed) sometimes get shot.
I realize that as a white woman, I’m lucky. Recently, I went into a local mall that’s struggling and photographed some of the darkened storefronts. I didn’t give it much thought. A couple of weeks later, my friend, who is black, did the same thing, but he got stopped and hassled by security. Maybe race wasn’t a factor; maybe I just didn’t run into any mall cops, and he did. But I keep thinking about it.
So my resolution for 2015 is to quaver less and trespass more — and “trespass” more, in places where I have every right to go and take photos, like malls, cultural sites (fortified or not), and streets whose residents emerge from their houses and pointedly ask me, “Can I HELP you?”
I’ll never silence that primal instinct to back away, to avoid confrontation. In 2015, though, it seems the least I can do to try.
